Free Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone: A Novel by Stefan Kiesbye

close; he’d taken naps with her in the afternoon until she was eight, and he called her
Mieze
. Now he brought her dinner when she felt too weak to come down from her room.
    I could have put it together myself if I had known how to connect my thoughts, moods, and observations. Yet it was Alex who, one day after school, asked, “What are you going to do with the bastard?”
    I stared at him; I hadn’t told him about the baby. “Nicole is sick,” I said dutifully.
    Alex’s bushy eyebrows met above his nose—he stared that hard at me. He was one class ahead of me in school and knew everything a year in advance. “My mom says she knows that kind of sickness. She also says it’s strange that your parents haven’t tried to pin it on someone. She says that if she were your mom, she’d be all over town defending her daughter’s honor.”
    “Nicole won’t tell me who it was,” I said.
    “Mom says there’s no one your folks can blame. It’s either God’s baby, or the devil’s, and the former hasn’t happened in two thousand years, so it’s the devil’s.”
    “The devil’s?” I asked.
    “Your dad’s,” Alex said. “I think that’s what she means.”
    The suggestion was so utterly impossible that I immediately knew it was true. That night at dinner, all the glances, silences, and quiet words suddenly made sense to me, as if I had learned a new language and for the first time was able to follow the conversation.
    I realized that my mother administered her beatings, not to find out the truth, but solely to punish, and that my dad’s smileswere not fueled by forgiveness but expectations. He was looking forward to seeing his child.
    I sneaked into my sister’s room after my parents had gone to bed. I pushed up her nightshirt and put my ear to her belly. My father was in there, small and unborn.
    “What is going to happen to him?” I asked.
    Nicole shook her head. She was beautiful in a quiet way. You wouldn’t have noticed her in a crowd, and yet once you’d spied her, you realized she could beat out any girl in Hemmersmoor. I was convinced we had to act quickly. The baby was due in March, and who knew what Mom and Dad had planned? There was only one way to make sure neither Nicole nor her child would be harmed.
    I did not tell Nicole of my plans; I did not want to burden her. No, I had to do it all by myself. Yet what could I possibly do without arousing suspicion? I tried to remember spells I’d heard mentioned in the village. I asked my friends to recount what they knew about ghouls, witches, and wizards. Time passed uneasily, and still I hadn’t come up with a solution. Soon it would be Christmas.
    On the first day of Advent, I ran over to Frick’s Inn to visit Alex. His mother had died the year before, and he helped in the pub in the afternoons and on weekends. His brother had long since left the village and sailed to New York. Nobody knew if and when he would return, and Hilde, his young wife, had moved into the apartment above the inn. “I had to move back to my old room,” Alex complained.
    While I was waiting for my friend, I overheard a conversation at the bar. A candle had been lit in the pine wreath hanging from the ceiling. Jens Jensen, who’d come right afterchurch as always, sat at the bar with a fresh glass of beer in front of him.
    “You’ve got to be careful that night. It’s the darnedest thing,” said the old man, while drinking his beer and scratching his gray stubble. “If you drink wine that night, you’ll be dead by Epiphany.”
    “What night would that be?” I asked. Alex was getting gloves and a hat from upstairs, and I couldn’t let this chance go by.
    “Who wants to know?” Jens Jensen turned away from the farmer’s wife he’d been talking to, a woman with broken veins webbing her face. Her husband slept peacefully by the fireplace.
    “It’s me, Christian.”
    “The Bobinski boy,” he said, looking me over. “Christmas Eve, of course.”
    “What happens